Monthly Archives: May 2007

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Crazy NEC fan Aaron Nanto (of PCeinginefx) has put up a new site with very high quality, close-up pics of turbo hardware, called Turbo Memoirs. It really is essentially hardware pornography. Very cool if you’re a fan of the consoles. Right now it’s just a gallery with bits of text, but I almost think that’s how it should stay, personally. Unless there gets to be some art films in there with no dialog or something. Actually kind of reminds me a bit of the white line, a site I linked a while back.

Bing Gordon is the chief creative officer at EA, and he actually made for a really good interview. You can read it here. He talks about a lot of stuff, but one thing ic readers might find particularly interesting is when I asked about the company’s lack of support for the Dreamcast, which many view as a nail in the system’s coffin. He also talks about Spore in there, and his three level 60+ World of Warcraft characters. Crazy.

WG: We lost confidence in Sega. With the Dreamcast, we told them two things: you should be an in-the-box online system, and you should use a 3D chip that we understand. They said, “We can’t afford to be online, and we’ll get back to you on the 3D chip.” They ended up using an unusual, non-industry standard, not well-supported chip. It was something that nobody in EA had ever touched.

They knew we had no experience with it and no belief in it. Then with online, they said “no,” then they said “maybe,” then they said “no.” They wobbled all over the place, and we lost confidence in them. At the same time, we knew that the PS2 was coming. I loved the Genesis. The Genesis was EA’s first video game system that we supported, and you always remember your first.

Not sure how I managed never to talk about this before, but I guess I didn’t. Back when the excellent band Xiu Xiu released their ‘Air Force’ album, they made a music video for the song Boy Soprano, which mixes 8-bit background graphics with digitized versions of the band’s two members, in a side-scrolling adventure. Rather odd and doesn’t necessarily fit the theme of the music, but it’s pretty awesome regardless. It was originally on the CD, but somebody’s put it on youtube as well – so enjoy!

Crazy PR man Frazer Nash alway has the best press releases – generally filled with typos and wacky rambling, they’re always a joy to read. Turns out Digital Leisure just hired him to promote their PS3-compatible Blu-ray version of Dragon’s Lair. And Frazer sent out a press release and…included a quote from himself in it. Here’s that bit:

“This game takes me back, I used to play the arcade machine in a right old fly pit, downstairs they had table top bingo and smelly chips, but on the street level they had slot machines and this game.. Each day it was a fight to get to play it, as so many people used to hang around the box waiting their turn

Leaf has opened the official page for their upcoming 3D RPG eroge, Kimi ga yobu, megido no oka de. The release date still remains as “in 2007”. More news for both Megido no oka and To Heart Another Days will be made available starting from July apparently. Kimi ga yobu, megido no oka de was announced in October last year and is Leaf’s biggest project to date, spending more than 2 years in development and featuring 5 of the most popular artists in the industry today.

Elf has also put up a trailer for their upcoming Dragon Knight 4 remake, and the release date has been delayed till the 29th of June.

Posted in Museum, News | Comments Off on News: Announcements from Leaf, trailer from Elf

R-Type Final may have been the last shooter in Irem’s series, but it wasn’t the last R-Type game. The newly announced “R-Type Tactics” for PSP falls into the genre of “hex-oriented turn-based strategy” – not exactly what I was expecting, but fresh none-the-less. Perhaps following in the footsteps of Cosmic Wars and Paro Wars?

Starting on the 21st of May, all the secondary schools in the city of Yawata in Kyoto have officially started using the Nintendo DS as an educational teaching tool for the English language. They held a trial run with a smaller group of 3rd year secondary school students over a period of 5 months, and have found that the vocabulary of the students increased by an average of 40 percent over the test period. Seeing the impressive test results, they decided to officially introduce it to all 2nd year secondary school students in the city.

We can probably expect that the use of the DS as an educational tool will only increase if the results this year continue to be as impressive as with the test group.

According to this blog by a Tama Art University lecturer, the Japanese government is apparently considering a revision of Japanese copyright law in order to more effectively curb piracy. Currently, if the copyright holder does not sue the copyright infringer, the law is effectively unable to do anything about it. However, they are proposing to change the law so the police effectively have the authority to make arrests for copyright violation based purely on their own judgment. This means that if this law goes into effect, it has the potential to make 95% of all doujin works illegal (as they tend to draw from popular manga/anime/games for characters), not just Nintendo/Konami/Disney related doujin works.